Anthropic is facing a new legal challenge in the US, with Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music accusing the AI company of using copyrighted works without permission to train its Claude AI assistant.
The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division. Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann are also named as individual defendants.
The complaint alleges that Anthropic used unauthorised copies of books and music publishers’ works as training material. It claims Mann downloaded at least 5 million pirated books from Library Genesis in 2021, while Anthropic employees allegedly obtained another 2 million books from Pirate Library Mirror in 2022.
The publishers also accuse Anthropic of “scraping” song lyrics from licensed platforms including MusixMatch and LyricFind. The complaint further alleges that the company “destructively scanned” millions of second-hand books and used datasets such as Common Crawl, “The Pile,” and Books3.
According to the complaint, Mann downloaded pirated books from Books3 on behalf of Anthropic “to avoid the trouble of paying for them, hoping they might prove useful for training large language models (LLMs) or something else.”
The lawsuit lists songs allegedly found in Anthropic’s training data, including “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” “Eye of the Tiger,” “Here Comes Santa Claus,” and “Paper Rings.”
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music are seeking damages of up to $150,000 (about Rs. 1.43 crore) per infringed work and up to $25,000 (about Rs. 23.80 crore) for each Copyright Act violation.
The publishers are seeking a jury trial and want all infringing copies of their copyrighted works in Anthropic’s possession destroyed under court supervision. They are also seeking an order requiring Anthropic to provide details of its training data and the known capabilities of its AI model.
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